Tim Thompson tim.thompson@netapp.com wrote:
It's a mechanism introduced in 5.3 for making options and other things persistent. It should be invisible, for the most part.
and Bruce Sterling Woodcock sirbruce@ix.netcom.com comments:
Tsk. And this worked so well for Windows, right?
Think ahead. All options and variables, persistent or not, should be documented and modifiable via plain-text files.
It's not quite as bad as this makes out. The persistent state of the options *is* recorded in a plain-text file, /etc/registry, which however one is [strongly?] discouraged from updating directly.
Before 5.3, options could only be persistent by adding things to /etc/rc, and we kept SCCS histories for that. Being able to strike out the accumulated options commands from /etc/rc was nice in a way, but I was concerned about keeping track of the history of permanent changes. I decided to keep a "master" file under SCCS control, and run
sed '/^#/d' /toaster-mountpoint/etc/registry | diff - /master-options-file
in a weekly crontab, to prompt me to either undo temporary changes, or record them in the SCCS history if I decided they were permanent after all.
Only slight snag so far is that upgrading from 5.3.4R3 to 5.3.5 made some automatic changes to /etc/registry which had to be post hoc recorded in the history.
Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service, Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG, Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.